Oceangate Titan Disaster: A Billionaire’s Dive into Hubris, History, and Horror

Oceangate Titan Disaster: A Billionaire’s Dive into Hubris, History, and Horror

Kyle Risi: [00:00:00] Apparently a Boeing's material engineer flat out worn stocks not to proceed with carbon fiber. In his report, he included a graph showing kind of the structural failure risks, to drum the message home included a little skull and crossbones drawn below the 4,000 meter mark.

So you've got people literally drawing death symbols and stockton's like, stop suppressing my innovation guys. Yeah, you what? You're ruining my creativity. Yeah. You never support me in any of my endeavors. What a fool.

Welcome to the Compendium, an Assembly of fascinating [00:01:00] things, a weekly variety podcast that gives you just enough information to stand your ground at any social gathering.

Adam Cox: we explore stories from the darker corners of true crime, the hidden gems of history, and the jaw dropping deeds of extraordinary people.

Kyle Risi: I'm Kyle Reese, your Ring master for this week's episode.

Adam Cox: And I'm Adam Cox, your, German Wheel specialist,

Kyle Risi: German wheel specialist.

What is this, Audi?

Adam Cox: No, no, no. You know, uh, in the circus you've got those giant rings that people like, they, they're in the middle of them and they roll around.

Kyle Risi: Oh, okay. And then they kinda like a coin as this kind of coming to a stop.

Adam Cox: Yeah, exactly.

Kyle Risi: That's why. Do you need a specialist for that?

Adam Cox: Well, I'm it, I'm the one that's in the wheel. I'm the German wheel acrobat.

Kyle Risi: I just need to be German

Adam Cox: because I don't know. That's what it's called.

Kyle Risi: Okay. I'm not gonna argue with you. In fact, I've learned better.

Alright, before we get stuck in today's episode, let's take a minute for a bit of housekeeping.

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Adam Cox: Yeah, it's wild.

Kyle Risi: Also, there's the Marie Antoinette episode. If you think you know her, you know all that. Let the meat cake and all that turns out most of what we think we know about her is completely wrong. That one was a real opener. So if you can check that one out.

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All right. That's all the admin outta the way. Let's dive into today's story because Adam, today on the Compendium, we are diving into an assembly of billionaire hubris, and the ocean's unforgiving fury.

Adam Cox: Interesting. Unforgiving fury of the ocean.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. You'll definitely know today's story, actually.

Adam Cox: Well, it's gotta be like some kind of disaster that's happened out at sea. Right? Well, I've already done the Titanic.

Kyle Risi: today's episode is actually [00:04:00] really closely linked to the Titanic.

Adam Cox: Ooh. Okay.

Kyle Risi: There is something really alluring about the ocean. Something that really calls to us. Maybe it's the mystery. Maybe it's the danger. Maybe it's the promise of something just beyond reach. This is exactly how one man felt about the ocean.

A man that many called a visionary, a pioneer, even determined to explore the extreme edges of the planet that we call home, and to push the boundaries of human ingenuity while doing it.

His name is Richard Stockton Rush Jr. And on the 18th of June, 2023, Stockton set off aboard his state-of-the-art submersible the Titan, along with four other crew members on a mission to explore the century old wreck of the Titanic.

But just one hour and 45 minutes later, the Titan vanished. No communication, no automated pings, no sign of the vessel. Just silence.

Adam. [00:05:00] Today in the compendium, I'm gonna be telling you the full story of the 2023 Ocean Gate Titan disaster.

Adam Cox: Wow. Yeah, this was a disaster, wasn't it?

Kyle Risi: What do you remember of the story?

Adam Cox: From what I remember, they were like missing for like several days and it was all over the news in terms of, have they survived? Have they ran out of oxygen? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, and then you find out the whole thing imploded of

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: All things you just, yeah. I don't think it was ever on anyone's mind initially when it was first reported.

Kyle Risi: That it imploded. Hmm. Well, let me tell you. 'cause today we are gonna bust some myths because soon after the Titan disappeared, a desperate search began and the whole world watched as rescue teams raced against a clock.

News channels in a grim bid for ratings ran 24 hour countdowns, tracking how many hours of oxygen were left on board, keeping people glued to the phones, and of course their televisions.

Meanwhile, social media exploded with memes and speculation and loads of misinformation.

But behind the headlines, the truth was far darker. Adam, for years, [00:06:00] before the title was even built, engineers and safety experts had been warning about its design. They'd raised serious concerns, and Stockton rush ignored every single one of them defiantly.

Eventually, the titan was found, but it wasn't floating on the surface, waiting to be rescued like the media deliberately led us to believe.

Instead, it had imploded instantaneously. Less than six seconds after its last communication, everyone on board was killed instantly, and now the Titan's wreckage was resting beside the very ship that it was trying to reach.

So you can appreciate the irony there, and that's where the story becomes really haunting because it's eerily similar to the tragedy that befalled the Titanic itself.

In both cases, warnings were given. In both cases they were ignored. Two vessels, two captains, and now. Two wrecks lie side by side at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Adam Cox: So the media deliberately led us to believe that they were waiting to be rescued

Kyle Risi: The Sombering truth is that the [00:07:00] media actually knew that the most likely outcome was that they had imploded and that they were dead.

And the chances of actually finding them floating up on the ocean was very, very slim. Yet that's the narrative that they pushed. Wow.

So we're gonna get into all of that today because today's story actually eerily rhymes with the Baby Jessica Rescue and also the Challenger disaster when 24 Hour News was still trying to find its feet and understand how they can really push that 24 hour news cycle.

Mm-hmm. And the things that they needed to do to make people glue to their screens. And this was just another iteration of that cycle, which is really sombering and really disappointing because as we always come to find, the media will always put profits and ratings ahead of sometimes even the truth.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Absolutely. To be honest, I'm not really sure what imploding means. like exploding everyone knows is a big explosion. There's like a fireball or whatever it is, and all the carnage is like thrown outwards. An implosion. Is that just everything being sucked inwards?

Kyle Risi: Pretty much. Yeah. Because you're at the bottom of the ocean. You're under all [00:08:00] this amount of pressure. Just imagine all of a sudden all the air gets sucked out. Of like a can and the whole thing just crumbles together. That's exactly what implosion means.

Right. So they would've been crushed, I guess.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Right.

So, Adam, today we're gonna fill in all the gaps. We're gonna look at the man behind the titan stocked in rush, the engineering risks that he took, the red flags, he dismissed the media frenzy that exploded as a world watch this tragedy unfold in real time.

Today's story is about innovation, it's about hubris, and it's about accountability or a lack thereof

I'm really excited about today's episode. So you ready to dive in? Let's do it.

So Adam, the guy behind Ocean Gate and the Titan is Richard Stockton Rush Jr.

If you were keeping up with the story as it was unfolding back in June, 2023, then you'll probably recognize him as that kind of gray hair. CEO of Ocean Gate. He's kind of plastered all over the news, like every time they were reporting on it. It's him standing in front of kind of the Titan Okay. That's pretty much him.

And his backstory is really [00:09:00] fascinating. He says that ever since he could remember, he'd always wanted to be astronaut. Specifically he wanted to be the first person to walk on Mars.

So the complete opposite of what he was doing in 2023, he says he always envisioned himself being Captain Kirk from Star Trek. You know, exploring new frontiers, boldly going where no man has ever gone before.

Yeah, captain's log.

Exactly. So while it's the opposite of deep sea exploration, they're both kind of at the frontier of different things. This might sound like the fantasies of a kid scribbling in his notebook , but Stockton rushed. He believed that exploring space was something well within his reach because he had both the means and the mindset. But most importantly, he had the lineage. He unashamedly says that he earns his wealth the old fashioned way, basically saying the bank of mom and dad was at his disposal.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I was gonna say, when you inherit a load of money mm-hmm. You could pretty do much anything you like, I guess. Exactly.

Kyle Risi: Everything is easy, right? Yeah. And basically he's saying that he grew his wealth from there, but he had a pretty good [00:10:00] head start. Mm-hmm.

His father was this guy called Richard Stockton, rush Senior, the president-elect of the Bohemian Club, which is known for its secretive gatherings of powerful men that basically gave him access to all sorts of elite connections and influence.

His grandfather was Ralph k Davies, who is the youngest vice president in standard oil's history. But if you go further back than that, Stockton Rush was also related to both Dr.

Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, who signatures both appear on the United States Declaration of Independence.

So it's fair to say he comes from a very, very long line of very, very impressive influential men.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say, he is got money, and then he is got these great, great, great whatever, ancestors. Yeah.

And so is that where the money's come from because of those people that signed the independence?

Kyle Risi: Not necessarily. I think his family were quite big in business anyway. Mm-hmm. Philanthropists and kind of business people, et cetera.

So the idea that something was just impossible, especially in the shadow of these ancestors, just wasn't something that was part of [00:11:00] his vocabulary.

He couldn't be a flop. He absolutely was not even an option Yeah. Before he even gets started at university stocks and Rush had become the youngest jet transport rated pilot in the world.

And from there, during his summer breaks from university, he would spend a couple of years flying charter planes in and out of the Middle East.

That's how you know you are, you are rich, right? Like, Hey, Stockton, what did you do over the summer break? Oh, you know, I just flew my plane out of Iraq, you know, for a bit like, just casually.

And I'm like, oh yeah, cool. Yeah. I got hepatitis from drinking, uh, dreggs of beer from people's drinks in the bar.

That's something I don't feel like we've talked about this. We need to have a conversation.

So basically he eventually graduates from Princeton with a degree in aerospace engineering. And so for him the next logical step was the US Air Force. But as he's going through the application process, he's dealt a massive blow when they tell him that he's actually failed the standard eye test and that he's actually never going to get a chance to be a pilot of a military aircraft So he is absolutely gutted.

Adam Cox: Is there nothing he can do, like wear [00:12:00] some glasses or is that not enough?

Kyle Risi: Well it's interesting 'cause I knew a guy who was also really good to be a pilot when he went to go apply to be a commercial pilot, he failed his eye test.

He didn't have 2020 vision. But he went for an operation to get it fixed. So I'm wondering like, is that an option?

Adam Cox: Maybe that wasn't a thing at the time. Laser

Kyle Risi: eye

Adam Cox: surgery.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, I dunno what the operation was.

So for him, clearly this wasn't an option. Mm.

At first it's really hard for him to take, so he spends some time sulking. He's coming to terms with the idea that he was never going to be a pilot, but this didn't stop him from still pursuing his dream of being the next Captain Kirk. Basically.

He also didn't want to do this under the US military anyway, because of course it was just potentially too limiting. He wanted to kind of do it on his own terms. A bit like Elon Musk, right? Mm-hmm. He's not answering to anyone.

So he lands a job as a test flight engineer within the aerospace industry working for McDonald Douglas, which is a huge, huge organization in the industry.

while there, he joins the board of trustees at the Seattle Museum of Flight, which is where he meets [00:13:00] his wife and fellow pilot. Wendy Wheel.

And Wendy's lineage is just as impressive as Stockton's, in my opinion, even more so because she's actually the great, great granddaughter of Isadore Strauss, who, if you remember from our Titanic episode, he was the co-owner of Macy's whose story is immortalized in James Cameron's 1997 film, the Titanic movie.

If you remember, Isadore and his wife Ida, they were the elderly couple who gave up their spots in their lifeboat to their maid. And in the movie, while everyone is like just freaking out, you just see them both sitting on deck chairs, holding hands, coming to peace with the idea that they were gonna die before. Like a wave just comes and sweeps them off.

Adam Cox: Yeah, them and the elderly couple in the bed. Yeah, when they go, that always made me feel really sad.

Kyle Risi: Actually, yeah. Am I mis remembering this? Maybe that's them. I think in real life they were sitting on the deck, but in the movie, they were in their beds. I can't remember. Or maybe there were two separate couples. I don't know.

Adam Cox: I can't remember now. But yeah, I always remember the couple in the bed. 'Cause they're just, they're like spooning each other as the spooning comes. Let's have one more

Kyle Risi: spoon babe.

Adam Cox: one more [00:14:00] spoon for good old times. ,

Kyle Risi: and then the guy's can I be little spoon tonight? And she's yes dear. No. Is this the last time?

So basically, it's fair to say that both Stockton and Wendy have both very incredible lineages.

So Stockton is working as a Tesla engineer, and on the side he continues flying as a hobby. He builds himself a small aircraft made of fiberglass, which at the time was highly questionable in terms of durability.

It's considered a bit of a radical kind of move to try and build an aircraft using these types of materials.

But here lies his hubris

He seems to consistently get wound up by people telling him that he's doing something wrong, which rather than stepping back and evaluating and going, okay, yeah, maybe fiberglass isn't the best thing for what I'm trying to do, it just spurs him on even more to try and prove them wrong.

Like he doesn't come from a family who've made their mark by saying something was not possible. Do you know what I mean? So to him it's like, well, I know better. I know what I'm doing.

Adam Cox: Yeah. You can't tell me what to do. You ain't my mother. All that sort of stuff.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

And so if you haven't really picked up on it, [00:15:00] this is the first bit of foreshadowing in the story

Adam Cox: that he won't listen to other people and does what he wants to do.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: Okay. I'm sure that doesn't work out well when it comes to health and safety.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. OSHA's gonna come knocking. Mm-hmm. And Eventually Stockton Rush realizes that the aerospace industry just isn't moving fast enough for him. He's getting older and he's kind of built his entire career on this notion that he was going to live through the commercialization of space flight.

But with every passing gear, that dream just seems to inch further and further away. This is when it hits him, that even if commercial space flight became a reality today, there was nothing really up there in space anyway.

It was mostly just a bunch of distant stars and the same old views of Earth that he's seen like a million times before in photographs. The odds of him ever seeing Mars, let alone Jupiter, were just vanishingly small. So he didn't see any point in chasing a dream that was just light years away.

Mm-hmm. But then he thinks to himself, there was one frontier that he could explore a world just as vast, just as alien but something that was completely within his reach. Under the sea. [00:16:00] Exactly. It wasn't above, it wasn't below, it was deep in the ocean.

And this made perfect sense to him because he was already a seasoned diver. In fact, by the age of 14, he'd already been certified as a scuba diver.

As an adult. Every time he went diving, he was always really put off by how limiting all the gear was. Like the masks and the tank kind of really restricted your field of view and where you are able to go and the depths that you are able to go.

So he starts to wonder if perhaps there was a better way that he could innovate in this area. And then it hits him. The answer was sitting right in front of him, submersibles

Adam Cox: to create his own little, um, submarine, I guess.

Kyle Risi: But at this point he is not able to physically create one, so he's actually gonna go to pipe one.

Adam Cox: I was gonna say, there's probably a lot out there, right?

Kyle Risi: Ins submersibles. Yeah. in terms of privately owned submersibles there's fewer than a hundred in the world, ah, that he has access to.

So it's not easy. Basically the submersibles, they would allow people to go far deeper than traditional scuba gear, meaning that he could explore things further afield, like shipwrecks and kind of trenches and things like that.

But accessibility on a [00:17:00] commercial scale just was just non-existent unless you were of course a researcher or a rich billionaire, and even then, expeditions took months, sometimes even years, just to set up an arrange.

So Stockton goes looking for a submersible to buy. Eventually he stumbles upon a bright yellow Kittridge three 50 rated for depths of a hundred meters.

It wasn't perfect for what he needed, but it was his starting point. So he sets about updating all the electronics. He customizes the controls, and of course he gives it a brand new sexy name. Suds.

Adam Cox: Suds as in like

Kyle Risi: soap suds.

Yeah.

Adam Cox: Why did he land on that? I think it's brilliant.

Kyle Risi: Why not? I don't

Adam Cox: know.

I feel like it should be like the Majestic

Kyle Risi: or the Pam. The Pam, yeah, exactly. So eventually 2006, just off the coast of bridge, Columbia, Stockton Rush takes suds out on its first dive and he's just blown away just by how alien and interesting the sea floor is.

He's seeing all these things that he's never seen before, which was just far [00:18:00] cooler than anything he imagined that he could see from a Sol bit.

Adam Cox: And he's piloting this himself? Mm-hmm. He hasn't got like a specialist?

Kyle Risi: Nope. Just doing it all his own.

Adam Cox: I don't know. I feel like you need to have some kind of skills or knowledge of the water to be able to do this.

Kyle Risi: I think if you are someone who's really ambitious and really driven, you'll just pick things up on your own. Right. And rich. He's rich. Don't forget that. Yeah. I'm sure he's had help. Obviously he's had help.

Adam Cox: I feel like the first time you should at least go with, it's like learning to drive a car. You need someone else there.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. But remember he has bought this, right? It's not like he's built it, it's certified to go under the water. It's safe. He's checked it out. He's kicked it a couple times. He's walked around, he's oh, can this scratch be buffed out?

Et cetera. So he knows it can physically go under the water.

Adam Cox: Sure. But even still, fair enough.

Kyle Risi: And the thing is though, like he's seeing all these cool things and what really blows my mind is that approximately 91% of all marine species are still waiting to be discovered. Did you know that?

Adam Cox: How do we know it's 91%? We found at least 9%.

I'm sure there's 91% more.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. How do they know? They can't do the maths on that unless they know what. The [00:19:00] missing bit is

Adam Cox: I get they haven't explored like the depths of some of the ocean floor. And so yes, maybe you can estimate you've only seen this part of the ocean. Mm-hmm.

But to know that there's 91%,

Kyle Risi: call up David. David who? David Borough. Oh, is he alive? There's a subreddit called, uh, Is David Attenborough alive. So you can just go on there every day and someone will just give you an update on whether or not he's alive. And there's just a picture of David Attenborough and we'll be like, yes, he is still alive. He's still alive.

That's it. Sometimes they'll post like an image of David Borough that looks like immor. Mm-hmm. Like a, like his best photograph. And the caption will say, sir David Borough's family have confirmed that he has peacefully passed a prostate exam at the age of 99. So

Adam Cox: I can't see this, sub aging very well when that actually happens. Oh

Kyle Risi: God.

Someone will finally post? No.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Yeah, he's died. that'll be such a sad day. He's such, I know. A national icon and hero.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: No, you,

Kyle Risi: it will be a sad day.

But yeah, apparently like 91% of marine species are still waiting to be discovered. And [00:20:00] basically what this means is that we know more about what's on land and in space than we do about what's in the middle of the ocean.

Mm-hmm. And with a submersible. Stockton could explore all of its ancient ship wrecks, lost planes, bubbling hydrothermal vents, all just waiting to be found. But remember, suds could only still go a hundred meters deep. Most of the ocean was far deeper than that.

So if he was gonna make this work, SUDS was going to need a major upgrade.

So he starts shopping for a better submersible, thinking like this was gonna be a breeze. But this is when he begins to realize, like throughout the entire planet, there are fewer than a hundred privately owned submersibles available for in Inspire.

And most of them are just museum pieces, which obviously can no longer go under the water anyway. Or they were just far too old, or far too outdated.

So he's like, what the hell am I gonna do?

And to him, the irony was that he had made this huge career change only to realize therefore the modern millionaire getting to space was beginning to seem far easier than getting to the bottom of the ocean.

Oh, right. That's weird, isn't it? So he's like, damn. Yeah, it's so weird, isn't [00:21:00] it?

So he realizes that if he's going to make this work, he's going to have to build the sub himself. But Stockton is rich, but he's not Richie. Rich. Rich. So if he was gonna make this happen, he was going to have to get someone else to pay for it.

So he does a bunch of research. He calculates that the appetite for the adventure tourism market, especially amongst millionaires and billionaires, is valid at around $275 billion a year.

Adam Cox: So he's identified an opportunity that there is a load of rich people out there willing to spend a lot of money on these big adventure things that no one else can do.

Kyle Risi: But this also includes commercial opportunities too, so where industries like oil mining and pharmaceuticals might be interested in exploring the sea floor.

Adam Cox: Why would pharmaceuticals be interested? What? To find Like new, like,

Kyle Risi: chemical compounds and whatnot. They just wanna see what's under there, see if they can maybe use it in the pharmaceutical industry.

Adam Cox: And probably like once all the drugs are like flushed out in your toilet into the sea, probably just go collect all them up and just repackage 'em up. Repackage them up. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: That's gross. That's nasty. So he takes all this market research. He pulls together a pitch and [00:22:00] he goes off to visit aerospace entrepreneur, GMO Zer line.

He proposes basically that GMO buys old suds from him, and together they'll set about modernizing it with all new tech and reinforcements, and basically they will sell expeditions to tourists and various industries.

At first, GMO is not sure, like helping oil companies drill the ocean while promoting this idea of ocean sustainability, conservation and research just all sounded too contradictory to him, in the end, Stockton wins him over by convincing him that he saw it like a needle exchange. Do you know, you know what any needle exchange is, right?

Adam Cox: No.

Kyle Risi: Basically, different cities around the world will be like, okay, drugs are illegal, but if you are gonna take the drugs, come to us and we'll give you fresh, clean needles.

Basically, the drug taking is gonna happen regardless, but you can still intervene to make sure it's done safely.

Adam Cox: Right? So in this scenario, they're saying like, you're still gonna go do this expedition. But I'm gonna provide what that's clean.

Kyle Risi: Even if these oil companies were looking to go drill for [00:23:00] oil at least they could be at the forefront, making sure it's done properly. Okay. So with GMO now convinced in 2009, the two of them co-found Ocean Gate, and this is the birth of our company.

Adam Cox: So it was around quite a while then.

Kyle Risi: Yeah, 2009. Mm So GMO's role was to basically help launch the company and then eventually step back into a passive investor role.

They set up headquarters in Washington and the expedition arm of the company was going to operate out of The Bahamas.

from the very start of their mission, it was clear that they were setting out to disrupt the submersible industry in a way that SpaceX had disrupted kind of space travel.

And Stockton was basically the perfect CEO because he doesn't like being told something is impossible, which is the perfect thing that you need when you are the CEO of such a pioneering initiative company. Do you know what I mean?

Adam Cox: Yeah. He is gotta be a visionary. He can't be told something like, no. And he goes, okay,

Kyle Risi: yeah. Okay. Yeah. So to him, 99% of the barriers were all just engineering challenges, right? And if they [00:24:00] could overcome all of those, then literally anything is possible.

So now SUD is out. They find a new submersible called the Inti.

And it was originally built in the 1970s and was used in the oil and gas industry. It was fairly small, it had room for like five people, but it could dive down to 300 meters.

They make a bunch of minor modifications to it. And once that was done, they set out on their first expedition to the SS governor Shipwreck, just off Victoria Island in Canada.

The wreck itself was rumored to contain treasure hidden away, kind of in a vault somewhere, a bit like the plot of the Titanic movie. Basically, they're there to try and find the heart of the ocean, the treasure was estimated to be worth 1.5 million to $4 million.

But strong currents meant that it was really unsafe to kind of go down there in regular standard scuba diving equipment.

But even with that said, they're not actually interested in the actual treasure itself.

It's more of the law of the wreck itself. And also it's very close to Washington where the headquarters are. So it's the perfect spot. And like I said, they were there to test anti's [00:25:00] mapping and surveying capabilities.

By 2012, ocean Gates had been going for three years. They'd learned a ton about the industry. They were doing a ton of research, and so they were now ready to take the next step.

They wanted to go deeper. They announced their next project with the launch of their newest sub called Cyclops One.

Adam Cox: So they're gone from suds, the Antide. Antide and Cyclops. Where are they getting these names from?

Kyle Risi: I think with the Cyclops it's more a case of, it's got this big old single viewport that looks like a giant eye, one eye in the center. So yeah, Cyclops there.

And basically Cyclops one was this steel hole. It could hold five people, but this time it was capable of entering down to 500 meters.

So they're retrofitted with a ton of new gadgets, including a new sonar technology kit. It's completely state of the art and navigating the sub is done with a PlayStation three controller.

Adam Cox: Wow. this is like pimp my sub kind of thing. I imagine. Did they have any like lights or some kind boombox and I don't know, like some new wheels.

Kyle Risi: It's fair [00:26:00] to say that they had a lot of pioneering tech on there.

Okay. So a lot of touchscreens. Single buttons, like when you get into your car right. There's one button to start the engine. Same with this thing. Fluffy dice, possibly. Who knows? funny. D maybe the fluffy Yorkers. Yeah. Hanging over the viewport. But also if you remember back from when the media were reporting the story, the game controller was the one thing that they really latched onto.

Do you remember that?

Adam Cox: Yeah. So they used the game controller to steer the ship. Why that? And not just a regular control?

Kyle Risi: well That's the question that a lot of people are asking, right? People start mocking them forward implying that if this is how the Titan navigators south, then what other corners did they cut? Like, or who navigates a bloody submarine with a PlayStation three controller?

Adam Cox: Yeah. 'cause I would've thought when they bought this submarine, it would've had a controller to move it around. Why have they replaced it with a PlayStation?

Kyle Risi: Using a gamepad controller in this way is actually fairly standard. Is it? Yeah, the military had been using game controllers for this purpose for years when using it to navigate drones and ROVs and things like that. So it wasn't like this inner thing.

The key [00:27:00] difference though is that the titans controllers were wireless, which means that if the signal dropped for any reason, then you were screwed.

Adam Cox: And I imagine like only recently had wireless controllers become good. Mm-hmm. Remember like the we that would always like mess up.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. But even still the military do not trust wireless. So I was looking at Reddit the other day with the Ukraine war at the moment, and they obviously have a huge artillery of these different drones that fly around and they're not wireless. They're connected with a single strand of fiber optic cable up to 10 kilometers long.

So this drone is attached to that and that's how they fly because really the signal can't be jammed. And also. It gives zero latency feedback to the actual controller who's controlling these drones.

So the thing that's really interesting is you see these kind of military fields and they're just laced and littered with just lines and lines of these fiber optic cables all over the place.

It looks like one big giant spider web.

Adam Cox: I had no idea when they talk about these drones, they are connected to a cable. They're

Kyle Risi: connected to a cable, literally a [00:28:00] cable. It's only like a couple millimeters thick, but they're attached to it.

That is wild.

But it's also like a major pollution problem because once the war is over, hopefully you'll be over sued. These things are just gonna be all over the countryside.

Adam Cox: Just these white, I mean, I guess you could recycle them maybe. I guess so. It's glass, I think, isn't it? Yeah. And so these controllers is weird because, am I thinking they're exactly ones with the square and the circle buttons?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. It depends. You can use different types of controllers, but this one specifically was a PlayStation three controller over the time.

Adam Cox: I just imagine, you know, like in Street Fighter you have to do like a special move. Yeah. You're like, like circle, circle triangle. A down forward back. Yes. Good.

Did they program it with special moves? Like a flick finish? There's an orca finishing.

Kyle Risi: Cycle Ops one debuts. Its first of 17 missions in 2015, but around this time something major happens that kind of sort of changes the market. And with it the entire direction of ocean gates, they start getting inundated with people inquiring whether or not they offered [00:29:00] commercial trips down to the Titanic.

In the early two thousands, an Australian based company called Deep Ocean Expeditions was routinely running these charter trips to the Titanic sites.

But in 2012, the Russian company that was leasing them, these submarines suddenly just ended their agreement. So a bunch of these rich millionaire adventure tourists had, like their book is just canceled out of the blue.

Some of them had been waiting like five years to visit the Titanic, and so Ocean Gate realizes that there is a ton of rich millionaires and billionaires begging to give them money to take them down to the Titanic. and I get the E law, right? Wendy has a Titanic connection, but also the story of the Titanic is so captivating to so many people, right?

From its legacy to the juxtaposition between the rich and the poor, the hubris, and of course the tragedy and the death. So it's kind of like the perfect story,

Adam Cox: yeah. I think there's still a lot of interest and I think 'cause the ship is relatively well preserved or had been up until this point that you, the fact that you could go see a lot of the world's biggest sort of ship at the time.

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Risi: [00:30:00] I always find it so fascinating when they managed to salvage some things from the Titanic, like dinner plates and combs and just, the personal effects that I find the most fascinating like hairbrushes and mirrors and things like, like that people physically used. Yeah. While they're on the Titanic is captivating.

So just as Cyclops one is getting started, ocean Gate pivots, they decide that they were gonna cash in on this opportunity and start taking tourists to see the Titanic.

But of course Cyclops one is only capable of depth of 500 meters. The Titanic is 4,000 meters down.

Adam Cox: Oh damn. That's quite a difference.

Kyle Risi: Hmm. So Stockton approaches a bunch of different private investors to see if they can secure some funding to create a better submersible.

He ends up partnering with this company called Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington and they basically unlock $5 million worth of grant money and they start working on a prototype. This is the Titan.

Adam Cox: Ah. So they're gonna build it themselves, but there has been other, Submarines or sub aquas, whatever, that have [00:31:00] gone to these depths before. Yeah. From the Russian company who've taken that back. Could they have not just gone to them and leased or done something like that?

Kyle Risi: think he wants to build his own company. Right. He wants to commercialize it. He wants to make something that is just really easy to produce and replicate. He can make a ton of them and he can really capitalize on it. Right. Maximize his profits.

A bit like what SpaceX is doing with their reusable rocket engines. Right, right. With NASA rockets can only be used once. Right. And then they've gotta get them rebuilt. He wants to create something that can just be reused over and over and over and really maximize on those profits. Sure.

So initially the Titan was called Cyclops two, but in the moment of realization, they changed its name to the Titan to reflect the fact that they were gonna be taking people to visit the Titanic wreck.

Once the Titan was built, it was 9,525 kilograms in weight. Probably like the size of a really large car. It's nine foot tall. It's 22 foot long. And unlike the other submersibles that they had before, Titan was brand new.

It was literally built from scratch. Instead of a [00:32:00] steel or titanium hole, the entire thing was gonna be made of carbon fiber, which is lighter, cheaper, and allowed them to make the sub far, far bigger than these other kind of rival kind of submersibles that were available for their purpose.

Designing the sub from scratch also meant they could design it to be more mobile and at less cost, ordinarily when you are deploying these other types of subs like that are owned by these research companies. You need really specialized equipment and a research vessel to transport the sub out to kind of your location and then to deploy it into kind of the ocean.

And they cost a hundred thousand dollars a day. So they figured that we could develop that deployment kit. So we didn't have to rely on these huge ships that we have to rent out at such a huge cost.

Adam Cox: So they would go from like the land, straight into the water, then they wouldn't be deployed from a ship?

Kyle Risi: No. So these launch vehicles would be put onto these huge ships, and then they would be taken out to the site and then deployed into the ocean from there. But it's just too much money. A hundred thousand dollars is a lot for every time that they wanted to deploy. [00:33:00] So if you're out on an eight day trip, you've been charged per day right. Just to rent out that, that, that ship.

But the biggest factor of the Titan was that it needed to be capable of reaching 4,000 meters. So they had to do a ton of tests in 2016. They start testing, they carry out 50 tests in total, and every single time it implodes before it comes anywhere near 3000 meters worth of pressure.

Adam Cox: Okay. 50 tests have gone wrong.

I mean, I dunno how many tests these kind of things have to go through. I imagine probably a lot more, but the fact is 50 times. Mm-hmm. And they haven't learned from that.

what? What's going wrong here then?

Kyle Risi: Basically it's the materials that they're using. They're building it out of carbon fiber. Right? Right. And everyone's telling them carbon fiber is not suitable for these depths.

What's worrying here is that while they're scrambling to get some successful tests out of this, they have already started announcing that they are going to be offering their first expeditions to the Titanic rec site.

Remember, they don't even have one that works yet, and they're now announcing it.

Adam Cox: And are they doing that to [00:34:00] get deposits essentially to help fund their project? Oh,

Kyle Risi: it could be, yeah. And to drum up interests and things like that. So they're jumping ahead of the gun a little bit here. Mm-hmm. But I, there's clearly a purpose as to why.

On the website, they market these as a luxury site scene tour. But it wasn't gonna be a Jolly Cruise because tourists were gonna be dubbed as mission specialists rather than passengers.

And Ocean Gate says that this way you would be actively participating in the research portion of the expedition. So basically you'd be helping taking readings and samples, working alongside kind of Ocean Gate's crew to just get the thing into the ocean.

Adam Cox: And you gotta pay for this.

Kyle Risi: hang on.

Adam Cox: You've given away like a hundred thousand dollars. I imagine this is gonna cost you at least, and you're like, yeah, you need to be checking the readings. And you're also gonna be steering it and be like, hang on a minute.

Kyle Risi: But listen, the logic there is that they say that this way the experience would mean more than just a regular trip. Because you're actually involved in it.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That's just some marketing ploy.

Kyle Risi: Remember this anyway, because it's gonna be very important later in the [00:35:00] announcement they say that you'll be sailed 300 north square miles out to the middle of the North Atlantic where you'll spend a couple days in training and orientation and if the weather permits, you'll have a three day window where you'll get the opportunity to dive down to the Titanic.

So it's not even a guarantee.

Adam Cox: Well, I understand that they, yeah, they are thinking about that. But yeah, to spend that much and not actually go down to the water,

Kyle Risi: it's crazy. And the promise was that this would be a once in a lifetime experience, but more importantly, the experience was open to everyone with a caveat as long as you had 105,000, $129 for the ticket.

Adam Cox: I mean, that's a hefty price tag, but probably not a lot for, a billionaire,

Kyle Risi: but also very specific. Right?

Adam Cox: Yeah, that's true actually.

Kyle Risi: It's because this is how much a first class ticket on the Titanic would've cost in 1912 adjusted for inflation today.

Adam Cox: Right. And so actually, how much profit are they making? Because I'm just wondering, have they gone for that price and then the markup is like huge.

Kyle Risi: [00:36:00] Do you know what? It's probably a hundred thousand and they're like, do you know what? Let's be romantic. Ah, here, make it $105,129.

Just so they can have that Titanic connection. That's what's happening here, basically. I see, I see. So they list 54 spots for the June, 2018 expedition. And almost immediately every single ticket sells out, but there's still no sub. And I mean, there is a sub, but it can't reach the Titanic.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: So the pressure is on, literally,

Adam Cox: Imagine they've got one of these things on the walls where they kind of have like a, a, a counter and like it's been this many days since the last without an implosion. Yeah. God yeah, probably.

And they never even got to use it.

Kyle Risi: Geez. So the pressure is obviously on, they expand their team to try and make target mostly employing eager interns. So corner cutting, foreshadowing. Mm-hmm. Just saying they continue modifying titans design between each test.

Eventually they replace the titanium endos of the actual sub itself. With carbon fiber ones, they increased the carbon fiber hole from 4.5 inches to five inches, so an extra half an inch. And by August, [00:37:00] 2017 with 10 months despair, they finally hit the winning design.

And now the titan is fully assembled and it can reach the bottom. Apparently, according to their tests. Yeah.

The final design boasted the largest viewport of any diving submersible ever built. So it's 20 inches wide. This scares me. It's made from acrylic.

Adam Cox: Okay. Yeah, that doesn't sound great, does it?

Kyle Risi: No. What also scares me is that the controls were like the single wall mounted touchscreen where everything is powered So if that breaks, you have no controls.

Adam Cox: Yeah, that doesn't sound good either.

Kyle Risi: Connected to that was a Logitech F 7 1 0 Bluetooth PC game pad. Basically a games controller that they bought from Amazon Stockton says like the review's really good, great.

And to start and stop everything on the sub, just like your Kia, a single button. So you press that button, everything comes to life, powers on, and then they're ready to go.

Adam Cox: And the fact that this is only gonna be up and running like 10 months before they actually take a passenger.

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. [00:38:00] Doesn't feel

Adam Cox: like long enough to go through enough testing.

Kyle Risi: I think they're gonna continue to test, like the design is ready, it's ready to be handed over to kind of Ocean Gate for doing sea trials before a passenger gets on. So they've got 10 months to do all that. And I don't think I personally would've ever gone into that, knowing what I know now.

Adam Cox: But then I guess these people didn't know that.

Kyle Risi: No, but this is touted as the cutting edge of technology, and so often we forgive that when someone says, this is the cutting edge of what technology can produce, we go, wow.

Adam Cox: Yeah, but without actually

Kyle Risi: understanding. Yeah.

Adam Cox: Stockton's saying this though. Of course.

Yeah. But you need some people to other people that are credible.

To back this up,

Kyle Risi: Stockton says, this is not your grandfather's submarine. Would your grandfather's submarine have Bluetooth speakers? Would it be steered with a gaming controller? and get this, he says it's made for teenagers to be able to throw around and that they keep a couple spares on board. Just in case. Just in case of what? You lobb it at someone. Yeah. Why are you doing that? Why are you lobbing a game controller?

Adam Cox: [00:39:00] And they're probably like 50 quid on Amazon.

Kyle Risi: They are. I think they're like $69 99. There we go. Then

That wasn't the only part of the submarine That was a DIY Joby. The seeding grab handles that people could hold onto while they were kind of going down, they were bought from camping weld on their website, the rubber flooring that was sourced from a welding supply shop. the toilet, considering the size of the sub and how cramped it looks when we've seen images.

They did have a toilet, believe it or not, which they bought from a container store.

Adam Cox: Where was the toilet? I don't think I've actually seen pictures of it.

Kyle Risi: Apparently it's at the very back of the sub. Right? The only thing separating you and the rest of the passengers is a curtain.

Adam Cox: Really? Mm-hmm. So you really don't wanna be doing your number twos down there? No. No thanks.

Kyle Risi: As a man, I only feel safe knowing that there's a wooden door separating me from anyone else while I poop. It's the only way. And the fact is you've spent a hundred thousand

Adam Cox: dollars on a ticket. And this is the not I expecting luxury, obviously you,

Kyle Risi: but I expect a wooden door. Yes. Basically this DIY approach was [00:40:00] practical because it meant that maintenance was super cheap. It's the same as your Kia blinker, right? It breaks, you go to the official Kia garage, they charge you $250, but if you go to Halford's, you can get the same part for like $30.

That's the thinking here. I feel like you've got something against my Kia. I like your Kia. I'm counter piece of the fact that it beeps at me every time I get into it, but I love it. It wants you to get out. Yeah. Get out, get out, get out.

So I imagine there's just no warranty on this thing, basically.

Adam Cox: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Definitely not. I mean, it's, it feels like what Blue Pizza would do.

Oh God. When they make their own at home with some sticky back plastic and whatever.

Kyle Risi: So art attack. Yeah.

So basically to me, there's just a lot of corner cutting here, which as we know when this story was unfolding, they got a lot of criticism for obviously the game controller itself, even though it is standard in military kind of crafts far be it's wired in rather than being wireless. But these are the types of things that they've got a lot of criticism for as a symbol of the hubris, being too arrogant and cocky with it, rather than doing things safely.

But when it came to the carbon fiber pressure vessel itself, so the whole, [00:41:00] the literally the partner's keeping everyone alive, Stockton says there's just no room for corner cutting. And we'll get into that in a minute, but that's another little bit of foreshadowing for us.

Adam Cox: Okay. But so the, it's made of carbon fiber. What about these Russian subs that they used that actually could go down safely? I guess

Kyle Risi: steel, titanium, like things that we know just cannot implode under a huge amount of pressure.

Adam Cox: But he's chosen carbon fiber because, it's lighter, cheaper, I'm guessing.

Kyle Risi: And he's convinced it's stronger, but it's not. Mm. So in the event of a malfunction, Titan did have a backup safety system. It was actually the sub itself, right? Because it's made from carbon fiber, it's neutrally buoyant in the water. This meant that if there was ever a problem, it would just float straight back up to the surface.

Right. Because of this. In order to make it sink, they had to attach sandbags to the outside of the Titan. So when the

dive is done, they could then just use a drop weight mechanism triggered from the inside of the sub to drop the bags and then it would just float up to the surface.

Right? In the event of the crew being all unconscious, [00:42:00] the hooks holding the sandbags are designed to naturally dissolve. So no Matter what, the sub will just always float up to the surface.

Adam Cox: And would it do it at a certain speed because obviously you need to do things at certain intervals because of the bends and the pressure and not necessary

Kyle Risi: for this because you're inside a pressure contained, sub anyway, so you don't have to stagger the way that you go down.

As far as I'm aware. I think maybe to do some safety checks on the hole to say, yeah, we've gone down a thousand meters, how's the sub doing this? Do some checks, et cetera. But in terms of like it affecting you as a person, it's not really needed because it's all pressure neutral on the inside.

Okay?

So by January, 2018, Titan is officially handed over to the Ocean Gates operation team and everything is ready for June. By then while testing Titan in The Bahamas. They get struck by lightning. It completely fries all of the electronics. And now the entire June expedition has to be postponed another year to 2019.

Adam Cox: Is this for paying customers as well? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Why a whole year? 'cause they need to rebuild the whole thing.

Kyle Risi: They can only really go out during the summer months. [00:43:00] Right. Okay. So they've got a very small window. So if you miss that, then there's no point going December, et cetera. Right. You've gotta wait till the next year.

But by December, 2018, the electronics, they've all been refitted Stockton pilots a solo mission to 4,000 meters, making him only the second person after James Cameron to dive that deep. It's also first of the world for submersibles made of carbon fiber as well. So that's a huge win for him, which for Stockton finally validates basically everything that he has been working towards.

He's like, see, you all told me this couldn't be done. Well, he just fucking did it bitches. Mm mm Foreshadowing.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I also think the lightning storm was also foreshadowing, almost like a warning as if you gave Yeah. You shouldn't really be doing this.

Kyle Risi: Yes, exactly. In April, 2019, they dive again this time with a crew of four. They capture a ton of really cool 4K video from the ocean floor, and now they think that they're ready for the first Taurus mission to the Titanic, but out of the blue, they canceled the 2019 expedition.

The official [00:44:00] story is that they were having issues with the towing vessel that physically takes the sub to the ship and deploys it, but privately something worse was happening.

According to a leaked reports, they had actually discovered a crack in the carbon fiber hole where layers were starting to kind of separate.

The report basically said that a catastrophic failure was inevitable and that they needed to rebuild the entire hole from scratch. So they hadn't even started yet, and now they're like, oh yeah, the whole thing's fucked.

Adam Cox: So the submersible has managed to get to the ocean floor, gone 4,000 feet. But the pressure is now, it's, it's not lasting. It's not very durable, actually. Exactly.

Kyle Risi: That's a perfect way of saying it's not durable. It's not lasting more than a few trips. So this is bad. It's really bad, and it's also not a good look for the Taurus who'd previously signed up. It kind of dents their trust in ocean gates capabilities A little.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Especially if you had booked the previous year. Mm. And now we had another year and you're like, what? This has now been canceled again.

Kyle Risi: So for now, it was back to the drawing board, but at the start of 2020, as we know [00:45:00] COVID hits, so this kind of buys 'em a bit of time to kind of get things sorted out a bit.

Stockton manages to secure another $16 million in partnership money with NASA and Boeing, and they pretty much help redesign a manufacturer a new hole.

This time though, it also comes with a brand new safety system. They call it the real time whole monitoring system. And basically the entire submersible is fitted with these acoustic sensors that can detect even minuscule stresses in real time in the carbon fiber hole.

That way, if they ever sense that it was starting to crack, the pilot would then be warned, allowing them to kind of safely ascend or automatically it would drop the sandbags and just force the thing to start floating up.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That. Sounds good and all, but I don't know how much time you'd have, even with the slightest crack or whatever, that the level of pressure is probably what's gonna happen.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. We know that this is a disaster when to happen. Mm-hmm.

So by the summer of 2021, they carry out a bunch of test man missions around 4,000 meters [00:46:00] deep. The same depth as obviously the Titanic. Everything goes smoothly. The telemetry is as expected, and they start to promote tickets for the 2022 Expeditions.

Again, passengers will be referred to as mission specialists, but now it has a sexy new price. Tickets adjusted for COVID inflation on our $250,000 per person. Whoa. Again, they sell out immediately.

Adam Cox: Did the other people get a refund then? Because they didn't know when they were gonna go back into the water,

Kyle Risi: I guess they probably did get a refund or they all canceled, would you wanna wait that long? I don't know. I guess if you are a huge fan of the Satanic, you'd be willing to wait and if you're rich enough.

Adam Cox: Yeah, probably.

Kyle Risi: And like I said, most of them sell to various millionaires and billionaires. There are like a couple of lottery winners on board as well, but some of the people are just regular Joes who literally remortgage their entire homes just to secure a spot on the Titan.

Adam Cox: Wow. That is something.

Kyle Risi: The thing they all have in common is that they were all Titanics essentially.

Adam Cox: They have a name,

Kyle Risi: they call themselves Titanics. Yeah.

Adam Cox: [00:47:00] Interesting,

Kyle Risi: Completely obsessed with everything Titanic.

So over the 2022 expedition, they make several trips down to the Titanic, all with regular passengers on board. It all goes off without a hitch. It's perfect. And by the end of the season, ocean Gate had done it. They had brought commercialized deep sea exploration to the world.

And at this point, Stockton is already talking like he's a visionary. He tells journalists, I'd like to be remembered as an innovator. He says, general MacArthur once said, you are remembered for the rules that you break. I've broken some rules to make this happen, but I've also broken them with logic and good engineering,

Adam, this is what we call in the industry more foreshadowing.

Adam Cox: Yeah. What other rules you broken?

Kyle Risi: He also says, they told me not to use carbon fiber with titanium. I did it anyway.

Adam Cox: Okay.

Kyle Risi: That's so kind of cringe.

Adam Cox: But they've had multiple missions then. Mm-hmm. Throughout June. Yep. I'm guessing in 2022 and they've [00:48:00] all gone off without a hitch.

Kyle Risi: Yep. No issues. Everything's fine.

Adam Cox: Okay. Alright. Well actually to be fair, it sounds like they have turned a corner. Mm-hmm. But obviously they haven't. What did they skim on? What, what went wrong?

Kyle Risi: Basically at the end of the 2022 expedition, the Titan is brought back home to rest until the 2023 season.

They store the Titan in what is basically a parking space. Outdoors in Newfoundland over the winter completely exposed to the elements.

Adam Cox: Okay. I think I've guessed it.

Kyle Risi: So obviously this can't be good. Right? And it wasn't because in February of 2023, after dusting the Tyson off and preparing it for the coming season, they're plagued with dozens and dozens of malfunctions.

They were only minor, but knowing what we know, these should have been like warning signs from like the heavens.

They were also hit with like a bunch of bad weather, which meant it was likely that the June expedition would have to be canceled altogether.

It was literally like the heavens were trying to prevent this next dive from happening entirely.

Adam Cox: Yeah. So it sounds like they should have really stored it at like a [00:49:00] room temperature or whatever it was.

Yeah. Not in a fucking car park. Do you know what, like we've gone through about four chairs. Mm-hmm. In the outside, those kind of string chairs. Yeah. Because they can't survive a winter. Yeah, exactly. And they're not quite carbon fiber, but still No, completely different. But all I'm saying is, we tried to store them so they wouldn't break in the cold.

Yeah. So I just can't believe they would've thought that this was a good idea.

Kyle Risi: So they're all on 10 hooks. Essentially, they don't know if they can actually do any of the dives this year. Every day. Ocean Gate, they study the weather looking for even the smallest window of clear weather to do a dive.

Eventually they spot the smallest opportunity opening up round about mid-June. It was tiny and it was tight. But this would mean that they would be able to squeeze in one dive, one dive only.

That would be dive 88 Titan's final dive.

So Ocean Gate, they scramble to prepare. They tow the Titan onto the launch ship that is called the Polar prints. They quickly call around all the passengers or mission specialists to tell [00:50:00] them that the mission was on and to get ready.

they all start scrambling to catch flights to the USA during the dive. Stockton was gonna be the pilot, as he usually did, and assisting him on board would be Titanic expert who is 77-year-old Paul Henry Nale, one by one, the mission specialist. They start arriving.

The first on board is a guy called Shada Dawood, who is a 48-year-old British Pakistani businessman from one of the richest families in the world. With him is his 19-year-old son, Soloman. DA's wife Christine was originally scheduled to dive, but in the end she gives up her spot to Solomon because he was dead set on breaking the Guinness World record for the deepest Rubik's cube solve.

Adam Cox: That's even a thing. Well, it is to him. So if I went into the Guinness Book World of Records mm-hmm.

I would see like who did the Grus cube in a plane? Who's done it all these different places in the world. Yeah. And he was able

Kyle Risi: to do it deep down. Yeah. I dunno if that actually, if you actually got the record authenticated.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Um, wow. But that's [00:51:00] really must be gutting for the mother as well. Yeah.

Because you know, I mean obviously she survived, but she almost, yeah. She gave up her seat

Kyle Risi: I imagine being 19 and being into Rubik's Cubes, you probably wore your mother down in order to be on this. So can you imagine the guilt Yeah. That she must be feeling as well? Not that she would've known

Adam Cox: either, but yeah.

Kyle Risi: Instead Christine and her daughter were gonna remain onboard of the polar prints while they all went down.

fifth seat, went to Hamish Harding. He's a 58-year-old British billionaire and adventurer, who is the current Guinness World record holder for the fastest circumnavigation of earth from both poles in a single aircraft. So he's a bit like a Amelia Earhart

Adam Cox: I see. And so did Solomon here that there was gonna be a world record maker. Ah, yeah. Like, Hey, I wanna meet him.

Kyle Risi: Solomon's probably looking at him thinking, yeah, but do you have a Guinness record for the deepest Rubik Cube solve? I think, not Mister.

Adam Cox: Yeah, but I think Hamish probably has a cooler record breaking. Yeah, probably.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Hamish Harding was actually a last minute edition after the previous guy and his son actually canceled. So they obviously [00:52:00] counting their lucky stars that they did. Yeah. Yeah.

Hamish of course, seen this as an opportunity too. Good to miss. On Facebook. He posts my next adventure.

I seem to say yes to everything and I figure out the details later on. Someone called me a couple days ago and said, do you want to go on the Titanic on a new sub that can reach the wreck? Of course I said yes. So I appear to be off to the Titanic for a 4,000 meter dive. Something I've always wanted to do but didn't think I'd get the chance so soon.

Adam Cox: I think like especially if they had a successful year the previous year. Mm-hmm. You would say yes, you probably would sign up to this. 'cause you think, oh wow it's, it is pretty safe or whatever.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. But I guess knowing what we know and knowing that's now memorialized on Facebook for the whole world to see forever.

It's quite sombering isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So they're all on board. The clear weather window is still holding the crew and the mission specialists, they go through the expedition briefings, they watch a bunch of presentations. At one point they even hold a ceremony honoring the 1,500 people who died on the Titanic.

The mission specialists, they are [00:53:00] advised to follow a low residue diet the day before, which basically just means no coffee. But I suspect it's because they don't want anyone pooping on the Titan low residue diet. Yeah. I have no idea what that means.

No coffee. Yeah,

Adam Cox: but surely. So on the morning, don't have a coffee.

Kyle Risi: Yes, exactly.

Adam Cox: And then maybe not like a curry the night before or anything that's,

Kyle Risi: there's no curry, just,

Adam Cox: you know, make sure you have something quite light, I imagine. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: They were also told to make sure that they download all their favorite songs. The only rule was no country music was allowed. And when I read that, I cringed so hard because I imagine this is Stockton trying to be one of those really cringey instructors who've gone through this kind of briefing a million times before. So they just start injecting overly rehearsed kind of jokes into their like little pitch.

Do you know what I mean?

And everyone just laughs awkwardly.

Adam Cox: Yeah, like country music is back now, so, um,

Kyle Risi: but that's true. Thanks for Beyonce, but yeah, I've vomited in my mouth a little bit.

Adam Cox: So is that because they play this music whilst they're going down like down like we'll make a playlist

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

Yeah. On [00:54:00] probably On your own personal iPhone or whatever. It's like three hours down. Yeah. So they, they're gonna be waiting a long time

Adam Cox: It's not like they have in-flight entertainment.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

So at 5:15 AM on Sunday, the 18th of June, 2023, the polo prints arrives just above the record of the Titanic at 8:30 AM two Dingys Ferry, the Titan crew and the mission specialist to the launch platform, they all get into the Titan and behind them a crew assist bolts them all into the sub 17 bolts around the actual, viewport of the actual sub itself

at 8:55 AM. The launch platform is flooded and they're lowered down into the ocean about 30 feet.

At 9:14 AM the Titan is disengaged and finally begins. Its 4,000 meter descent. It was gonna take them two hours, and I'm told it's completely pitch black because they have to keep the flood lights off to save kind of battery for when they actually reach the wreck So you're just sitting there bored listening to your country music or [00:55:00] not. 'cause it's banned

at 9:18 AM The Polar Prince sends its first routine com check to which the Titan replies back 44 seconds later.

From there, the automatic pings continue to ping the Titan every five to 10 seconds. This tells 'em basically that they still have contact with the sub.

At this point, everything is running smoothly. Around one hour and 45 minutes later, Titan reaches a depth of 2000 meters.

The Titan initiates another manual com check, which reads all good. Here

at 10:47 AM The Titan messages for a third time reporting that it had dropped one of its weights. This is basically a sign that they're nearing the bottom and beginning to kind of slow their descent.

Right. Six seconds later, the polar prints receives their expected automatic ping as expected and following the same pattern.

And then six seconds later, nothing. Two more minutes go by. Still no automatic ping.

At 10:49 AM the polar print sends the message saying [00:56:00] lost tracking again, they wait. There's just no response, Adam. They keep just sending these messages every couple minutes, but each time there's just no response and eventually there's just nothing that they can do.

They aren't even sure if this is a malfunction or kind of just interference from the ocean. Mm-hmm. All they can do is just wait and hope that if there was a power outage, that the Titan's backup would kick in, it would drop the sandbags automatically and then just ascend back up to the surface.

It took like one hour, 45 minutes to get down there in the first place. So it would be the same amount of time before they would drift back up to the surface. So all they can do is just wait.

Adam Cox: Is that kind of the protocol then if we lose, track of you, we can't communicate, don't carry on.

Just come back to the surface,

Kyle Risi: I guess so, yeah. And I guess if there was a power outage that couldn't do anything, those things would dissolve. Yeah. The sandbags would drop and they would just float up. Yeah. Okay.

The fact is that it just never does. So they are sitting there watching binoculars out on the polar prints, [00:57:00] scanning the ocean to see anything pop up and nothing happens.

Adam Cox: I wonder at what point do they panic? Do they just concerned but then I guess three hours after losing contact, that's when they're thinking.

Kyle Risi: I guess it depends what's typical. What's happened before? We don't know. We don't know if they've lost contact before and they've been like, it's fine.

We regained contact like an hour later. Yeah. So we've just gotta wait. But at this time they are literally just waiting.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: The following morning on Monday, June the 19th, 2023, the US Coast Guard launches a search and rescue mission. They coordinate with the Canadian authorities. They scramble a bunch of helicopters and ships and other submarines.

They drop a network of the solar boys to just monitor for any movement that might indicate that the Tyson was trapped on the sea floor somewhere. At this point, they're hopeful, like they still think that the titan has floated up to the surface somewhere, but it's just been swept away by some kind of current or something.

But if this was a case, that's a problem because remember, they are bolted in from the outside, [00:58:00] which means that if they didn't find them soon, they would go into suffocate.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And this is 24 hours afterwards.

Kyle Risi: The next morning.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: They estimate that the Tysons got 96 hours of breathable air left.

Okay. the rescue teams. They end up searching an area of 7,600 square miles of ocean. Wow. So just for perspective, that's larger than the state of New Jersey. That's huge.

Adam Cox: Like looking for a needle in a haystack, I imagine?

Kyle Risi: Yeah. To make things even harder, the clear weather window is now completely closed.

So the search has literally been carried out in thick fog. One of the aircraft picks up an unusual banging noise, seemingly repeating at regular intervals, every 30 minutes. So they divert the ROVs, which basically these unmanned robotic mini submersibles, which are searching around the wreck of the Titanic, and they divert these to where they hear the sounds coming from.

Of course,

while all of this is going on, the media pickup on the story straight away, this is absolutely gold because it becomes like the Baby Jessica score, the challenger disaster. The thing that [00:59:00] anchors this as this massive news story, is the idea that these people are lost out in the Titanic, which is 30 hours of oxygen left or whatever it might be, and around the clock they display these countdown timers showing when the oxygen was due to run out. And everyone is just watching on tender hooks.

Adam Cox: I guess at this point the media picked up on it because they know that there is this search and rescue operation. And I'm guessing they've been informed that there's like a two to three day window of being able to find these people in this.

Yeah. And they're quite confident at this point, maybe based on those that are searching, that they could find them

Kyle Risi: you would think. Right. the truth is actually very different and we're gonna come onto that.

This is a full circle moment where this type of reporting first started with baby Jessica in the 1980s. Right. The question everyone was asking is, will they be rescued?

Will they all suffocate? The only difference is that 30 something years later, we now have social media and it is all literally going off. Hundreds of memes start flooding the internet. People are actually needlessly cruel. It's really such [01:00:00] a shame with memes of the Titanic. Next to kind of a PSP warning message saying, please reconnect your controller.

Adam Cox: That's a bit insensitive.

Kyle Risi: Tasteless on the Polar Prince Christine Dew and her daughter. They are desperate for any news. So of course they're following all of this discourse super closely. Only seen people being really needlessly horrible and cruel about they're father and their brother who's just died

eventually. christine says that she just starts losing hope after the 96th hour mark, because that is when, if they had survived, when all the oxygen would run out.

Adam Cox: Yeah. Like odds are slim anyway. So You'd have to assume the worst.

Kyle Risi: So Hamish Haring's stepson, Brian s, he posts on Facebook saying that he was going to a Blink 1 8 2 concert.

He wrote, it might sound distasteful, but my family would've wanted me at that show. It's my favorite band. Music helps me through tough times, you know, that feels a bit, it's awful. Yeah. Later he tweets Yes, please. To an OnlyFans model asking, can I sit on your face?

So he's basically a piece of shit.

Adam Cox: Is it the [01:01:00] media that's picked up on this in terms of what his whereabouts is, he doesn't care about his family. It seems like that, I mean, who does that? Just don't

Kyle Risi: say anything? In my opinion,

does he think that is, you

Adam Cox: know, everything's gonna

Kyle Risi: be okay. Who knows? he gets so much backlash for this. Cardi B goes live on TikTok saying this is why people hate you. Spoil billionaire brats. This man is missing and you are out there shaking dicks at a concert. I'd rather be poor and loved than rich and ignored.

Mm-hmm. that's what's so interesting about the story, because these people were millionaires, even billionaires, people just have zero empathy for them at all. The discourse switches to essentially they had it coming or this is a clear example of billionaire hubris, a lot of people start comparing the reporting of this, or the lack thereof to the fishing boat that capsize, or just a week earlier where 700 migrants off the coast of Greece just capsize and 500 people died.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I remember this because people were, annoyed that this was getting so much news and attention. When you've [01:02:00] got these poor migrants and everything like that lose their lives and don't seem to get a look in or people seem to care.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. That's it. People were like, there was no international rescue operation there.

There were no sonar boys, there were no press conferences. There was no countdown timers ticking for them, apparently the Greek Coast Guard weren't even that far away, and yet they chose to do nothing and the press barely just reported on it.

And it's true when you think about it. It's a really interesting reflection on what society has become. Maybe it's just that we've had far too many migrant ships capsized and it's no longer newsworthy. Or maybe it's a reflection on where we are as a society today.

Like you could blame the media for not reporting on it, but the media responds to what people wanna watch. Right? So can you really blame them?

Adam Cox: You're right. Because they're driven by viewership in the stories that they churn out and focus on. Yeah. And you're right, with migrants and stuff like that and immigration, that's an everyday occurrence, right? And so there's, that's nothing new. There's probably another one, a few weeks before that or whatever, whereas this [01:03:00] is a freak accident, which I guess there is, it's novel in that sense.

Mm-hmm. And so it is gonna have more interest and also because of perhaps the lack of empathy towards these rich people. Again, that's going drum up a lot of hate, or at least interest in the media.

Kyle Risi: Basically this is saying that the problem is us as a society, and that would be desensitized to the basic humanity,

Adam Cox: As a society.

There's probably an element of truth there. Yeah.

Kyle Risi: Obama eventually calls us out saying that this is an example of obscene inequality. this is indicative of the degree to which people's life chances have grown so disparate. Mm-hmm. And he ain't fucking wrong, is he? No.

Of course, throughout all this reporting, various people start coming forward because as we know from the Challenger disaster and the Baby Jessica story, talking heads is what keeps that news cycle ticking.

They are all commenting on how all the warning signs were there from the very start.

One person says that Stockton had consulted them back in [01:04:00] 2015 about the viability of using carbon fiber in a deep sea submersible. And they talk about how they outright warned him against it and say that Stockton just ended up getting really defensive.

He told them like, I've done the math and I'm confident in my engineering. So just back off. And other people say that they became really worried that Stockton planned to stop carrying actual tourists on board before they were like, oh, just let him do what he's doing. He's not harming anyone. But now he's physically planning on taking actual people down there. And that's when they were like, no dice.

Adam Cox: But this was before NASA and Boeing got involved. Right. That so I'm not trying to excuse it, but I'm just trying to say, once they got involved, they made a more durable, at least for that season.

Submersible. Was anyone criticizing them? Because they've almost signed off on this, haven't they? We're gonna get to them in just

Kyle Risi: a second. Very interesting. Okay. But basically, one guy begged Stockton to get Titan certified by a regulatory agency, which is the process that every commercialized kind [01:05:00] of submarine on the earth has to go through to prove that it's built to code has been tested and is safe.

Right. But stocks in completely refuses to go through that certification process. Mm-hmm. His response is basically, regulation is the enemy of innovation, and getting Titan certified would just take far too long. It would cost too much money and just end up slowing him down.

The reality is he probably knew that the Titan would fail the certification process, so he didn't want to deal with the paperwork and the questions that would come from that.

But even people who were initially supporting him, started changing their tune. One guy called Carl Stanley, who worked for a deep sea exploration company in Honduras, says that in 2019 he was out on an expedition with Stockton, when he hears a sharp, loud crack from the hole, which just ends up freaking him out, he later sends an email to Stockton saying, I think there's a defect near the flange.

It's only going to get a lot worse. The question is whether it fails catastrophically or not. My recommendation is that the Titan undergo more testing before you do anything else.

he [01:06:00] says, if you push forward with Titanic dives this season, it won't be financial pressure driving you.

It's going to be your ego. You're doing this to prove people wrong. And that is not the right reason.

Adam Cox: Wow. So someone that was on his side to flip like that. Yeah. That's quite interesting. The other thing I just wanna go back to is you said about the flange not being right. Yeah. As almost like the left flange, the left fla,

Kyle Risi: this submarine has no flange.

Adam Cox: Just, friends reference obviously a very horrible situation, but Yeah,

Kyle Risi: I didn't realize that was a thing. Yeah, it's a thing. But all this pushback, Stockton just sees us as a personal attack on him and on innovation.

His constant go-to response is that he's had the best engineers from NASA and Boeing and the University of Washington's applied physics lab working on this. They cannot be wrong.

So when these big names and their involvement start to emerge, a, b, C news reaches out to them for comment, or three of them deny the level of involvement stockton had been claiming

Adam Cox: [01:07:00] really? So, okay. 'cause before I can understand, maybe it's his ego, but also he's had this information corroborated by these industry leaders. So you feel like, okay, that's why he's pushing forward. 'cause other people have backed him up.

Kyle Risi: It's giving him credibility. Yeah.

Adam Cox: But now you're saying actually

Kyle Risi: mm-hmm.

Adam Cox: But the, he was boasting about the fact that he had Boeing involved.

Kyle Risi: What did they say then?

So the University of Washington's applied Physics lab said that it had nothing to do with designing engineering or testing the title whatsoever.

In fact, they said that they were forced to sever their relationship with Ocean Gate over engineering disagreements. Apparently they, and Ocean Gate had completely different mindsets. For Ocean Gate, it was all about pace, speed and innovation. But for the applied physics lab, it was all about doing things right.

Yeah. And 'cause they couldn't agree to see iron and eye on that. They just cut ties

Adam Cox: but then this wasn't made public, I guess because it's just a falling out with a partner.

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

Adam Cox: But then I thought. If there's gonna be people's health and safety. Surely there's someone else you need to flag it to or I don't know, put something on your [01:08:00] website to say, we are not working with this person.

Kyle Risi: So nasa, they said that they only consulted on materials but didn't test anything and Boeing insisted that they had zero input on the design.

So what's happening here is that these huge companies were probably involved at some point, likely at a minor level or very briefly, and Ocean Gate was using their name to add credibility to their mission.

And I get it, people do this all the time. I work for a company that secured a huge contract with a major industry player, but the deal fell through like a few weeks later. But still, because we worked with them, even if it's just for a couple weeks, we still list them on our website as a partner because it makes us look good.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I get that. And, but I imagine Stockton, he's consulting with them on a specific thing, but perhaps only giving them certain information, like what materials would you suggest for this or whatever.

Kyle Risi: He wants to make the carbon fiber work, that's the thing that he is not budging on. And they're all saying no carbon fiber,

Adam Cox: are they?

Kyle Risi: Apparently a Boeing's material engineer flat out worn stocks not [01:09:00] to proceed with carbon fiber. In his report, he included a graph showing kind of the structural failure risks, to drum the message home included a little skull and crossbones drawn below the 4,000 meter mark.

So you've got people literally drawing death symbols and stockton's like, stop suppressing my innovation guys. Yeah, you what? You're ruining my creativity. Yeah. You never support me in any of my endeavors. What a fool.

Then there's a company that built Titan's acrylic viewpoint. When they find out that Stockton was planning a mission to the Titanic, they were stunned because their viewport was only rated for 666 meters. So a scary symbol there. Marker The Beast. And they were planning on diamonds 4,000 meters, yet Stockton installed it. Anyway,

Adam Cox: so how do these brands and companies not, I don't know if you know that, what could be happening?

Kyle Risi: They're just supplying materials, right?

Just because I buy, let's say, some fertilizer from [01:10:00] Amazon. They don't have a right to tell me how to use it. Yeah, that's true. They'll probably flag it to the police. But do you understand what I mean?

Adam Cox: Yeah. And that's probably in the legal print or whatever in terms of using these products.

But I dunno, I just feel like there was so much, concern for people's wellbeing, especially turning it into a commercial thing. What was there not more press or news about this?

Kyle Risi: Yeah.

But get this on top of all of this, the hubcaps of the titan, they were physically glued on. What are the hubcaps? That's the viewport. So there's this, like this hemisphere, dome thing. Yeah. So that the components of that wall just glued,

Adam Cox: that doesn't feel secure at that depth.

Kyle Risi: No. It should all just be fucking steel.

The titanium. Yeah.

It just seems that everyone around Ocean Gate, people who had worked with them, or even past employees all eventually became seriously concerned that this was all going to end in tragedy.

In March, 2018, 40 different experts, engineers, educators, and loads of Stockton's own peers from the Marine Technology [01:11:00] Society, they all wrote and signed a letter urging him to reconsider.

They said that they were worried that the Titanic was about to become more than just a metaphor. Ouch. Powerful, but sadly true.

When Axton gets hold of a copy of that letter, he calls 'em up in a rage and he tells 'em that he's gonna leave the association. If they try to force him to pull out and they tell him You can't leave, because simply by doing what Ocean Cape does, you are automatically in that brotherhood. And so you have a responsibility to public safety.

And so Stockton reminds them that actually the Tyson wasn't bound by any US regulations since they are registered in The Bahamas.

Adam Cox: This guy, he just, he doesn't care, does he? No. Fair enough. You don't, you want to crack on with your own plan and not be like, suppressed or whatever it might be. But this is people's health and safety on the line. Yeah. He's just so arrogant to think that he is right. When you've got this many credible people saying, don't do it,

Kyle Risi: yeah, exactly.

It's the hubris of it all. It's arrogance is the overconfidence. So according to him, the Marine Technology [01:12:00] Society, they can just go suck it. And this is why Titan's passengers are called mission specialists and given jobs to do on board. It's illegal to transport passengers on an unclassified experimental submersible, but it's not illegal to transport Crew.

Plus, if a crew member dies, it's far less troublesome for Ocean Gate itself. Less paperwork. Ah. Even tensions within Ocean Gate. Were starting to heat up when Stockton refuses to listen to engineer's concerns altogether.

A guy named David Lockridge, he's hired as a safety inspector on board, and he says that in 2018, Stockton had made his job completely impossible to carry out.

When David reported several issues with the carbon fiber hole, he requested that Ocean Gate carry out a complete scan to check for any damage. Mm-hmm. The issue was that Titan had been coated in what they call rhino leather, which is basically like a truck bedliner. Basically, this makes it impossible to do any scans without it being removed.

Stockton completely refuses to remove that lineup.

So [01:13:00] David was like, okay, plan B, give me access to the telemetry and the internal documentation so I can carry out an analysis against that data. And again, Stockton says, no dice.

David has no choice but to write up his report detailing his findings, including the complete lack of cooperation from Stockton himself.

And of course, after submitting that report in 2018, he's fired and he's given just 10 minutes to pack up his desk and leave.

He's behaving like a 6-year-old.

Adam Cox: Yeah. And the thing is, these poor people that have signed up to this, are probably not aware of just what Stockton

Kyle Risi: are. No idea. They think he's a visionary, an innovator, an incredible guy.

It's probably the same situation with Elon Musk. People look at him, I know he's an absolute loser now, but people looked at him at one point going, wow. He's a genius. Yeah. But actually what's going on behind the scenes. Yeah. And we know that he throws temper tantrums.

He thinks he's smart. He thinks he's clever. He's just not, he's an idiot.

Adam Cox: This Stockton as this,

Kyle Risi: I'm talking about Elon Musk. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's the same parallel. Mm. At a later inquest. David talks about a time during a dive on [01:14:00] Cyclops. One where they were taking passengers down to see a shipwreck, and David had to keep reminding Stockton to keep his distance away from the wreck.

But of course, Stockton knew better. And surprise, surprise, they slammed directly into the wreck and they get wedged in Stockton apparently goes into full blown panic, and David is just doing everything he can to just keep him calm and just like keep everything going.

Is asking Stockton, just hand me over the control. Stockton just completely refuses. He's frantically smashing the controller buttons, literally doing a Mortal combat combo, which just results in them getting even more wedged in.

Eventually a passenger has to scream, just give him the fucking controller to which in a huff, Stockton LOBs the controller. It hits David in the head. All the buttons pop off.

Ah,

Kyle Risi: they were stuck under the sea at 3,500 meters. Geez.

What happened then? Basically, David manages to reattach the buttons, and within 15 minutes he's able to free them. But Stockton wasn't letting him get near the control.

Adam Cox: Got this [01:15:00] weird power play.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Later on board, he's dubbed a hero. That's David. And now Stockton looks like a complete fool. And from that moment, he starts to put in plans to push David outta the business. And eventually he's fired after David files that 2018 report

Adam Cox: Do you know what, this isn't the first time where you hear of like CEOs just with their egos where they just can't be told or are worried about some being upstaged by someone. Yeah. I just, I find it fascinating that they don't do things for the greater good or for the whole business.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. It is almost like a kind of twisted logic in that every bit of pushback you see, you think is an attack. Mm-hmm. It's a defensive thing. You become extraordinarily paranoid because people don't want people to be successful sometimes, but a lot of people do.

Adam Cox: This is jealousy. I think I remember an old boss, which I won't go into detail, but it's that self-sabotage that you do. Yeah. Just at the hands of trying not to say face or anything like that. Yeah, that's it. Or lose face, I should say.

Kyle Risi: Again, all about ego. Exactly as you said. So David, he [01:16:00] contacts OSHA and he enrolls himself in the whistle blowing protection program.

Basically, he's priming himself to blow this whole thing open and expose Stockton's negligence. But Stockton turns around and he sues him for breach of contracts, fraud, and misappropriation of trade secrets.

But as soon as David counter sues for serious safety concerns, Stockton just does everything he can to keep it all from going to trial, because of course, that's gonna expose everything. Yeah.

And so in 2018, they just end up settling outta court. Now remember earlier when I said the Hamish Harding, he was like a last minute addition to the mission specialists.

Mm-hmm. Because of course, someone had pulled out, well, that person was a real estate developer in Las Vegas, a guy called Jay Bloom. He and his son were supposed to be on what turned out to be obviously Titan's final dive.

But they backed out again over safety concerns. He had heard on the grapevine that it was extraordinarily dangerous.

Wow. And they failed a load of these tests. And so Hamish took his spots. But Jay later says that when he looks [01:17:00] at the photograph of the father and son who are on the Titan, he's like, this could have easily been us.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, he's lucky to have got wind of that. But it's just one of those things like how much can you do to try and get something out there?

Because it looks like David did the best that he could.

And then he settled out of court.

Kyle Risi: So again, this was just a tragedy waiting to happen and people all over could see it, but not Stockton. And it's not like people just stood by and let this happen, right? It wasn't negligence on their part. People did have concerns, but it just never saved the day.

Yeah, basically. So the search for the Titan is still in full swing on June the 22nd. Four days after it loses contact with the polar prints.

All the oxygen countdown timers on the news have all reached zero. Pretty much all hope is lost at this point when suddenly an ROV searching around the Titanic spots the tail cone of the Titan about 500 meters away from the wreck Soon after they find more debris scattered across the surrounding area, it's clear that the wreckage was consistent with what they called a [01:18:00] catastrophic loss of chamber pressure.

Basically it imploded and a few hours later, the US Coast Guard, they tweeted then an update saying that they found the debris field, which they confirmed at a press conference later that afternoon.

And if you remember from the reporting, the media were pushing this narrative that the sub had simply lost contacts and might be bobbing up on the surface slowly running out of oxygen.

Right? Here's the thing. They knew without a doubt that the most likely outcome was that the Titan had imploded. They knew that a loud bang had been reported by the crew onboard of the polar prints just six seconds after they had lost contact.

Even the Navy had detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion. Most of the search was focused on finding debris with a small number of people looking for a possibility that they had floated up. All of that information was shared with the media, but the media chose to omit that just so they could keep pushing that kind of rescue [01:19:00] narrative.

Will they find them? Won't they find them Oxygen running out? Keep watching. Stay tuned. Be hopeful. It was all the same kind of storytelling that made baby Jessica in the challenge a disaster. So captivating at the time. Like, would baby Jessica be rescued from the, well, would they find the challenger crew floating in the ocean?

Just, it's the same thing. Isn't that just the sickest thing that you've ever heard in your life?

Adam Cox: And this is all like news stations, isn't it? It's not like it's just one or two. Mm-hmm. So do you almost have to like follow suit because others are doing that? Or can you like break the mold there and actually just report the facts?

Kyle Risi: I think it's probably even worse nowadays because there's so many 24 hour news networks out there. So you're competing, right? Mm-hmm. Who is telling the most compelling story?

Adam Cox: Yeah. Who's gonna keep you hooked? Yeah. B, B, C News 24, whatever, CNN, this, that, the other,

Kyle Risi: it's so sick.

So from early on they knew that the Titan had imploded almost certainly the second that they lost contact.

They say that the implosion would've meant instantaneous death, which I guess probably [01:20:00] provided some degree of comfort to the families of the people who died. However, some experts do believe that they would've been cracking noises at least a minute before that implosion,

Adam Cox: so, yeah. They would've known what's about to happen.

Kyle Risi: Especially considering one of Titan's key safety features was that acoustic system monitoring for warping, like they would've heard the acoustic feedback building up at least a couple minutes before,

Adam Cox: and would they have heard that back on the boat as well? Like when they're sending signals back and forth about how things are going? It's a

Kyle Risi: good question. I dunno where the monitoring system was. Was it just sequestered to the actual. Submersible itself or did it feed back up to the polar prince? I don't know. You

Adam Cox: kind of want it feeding back to the prince to kind of know like actually something's going wrong.

Yeah, get, get him back.

Kyle Risi: James Cameron says he is struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster itself where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and a very similar tragedy where warnings went, unheated He says It's really quite surreal and here we are again at the same place [01:21:00] now there's one wreck lying next to the other wreck for the same goddamn reason.

Adam Cox: Yeah. That is weird. The fact they're both like laying next to each other.

I think you know, a warning for anyone else that wants to go discover the Titanic. Just

Kyle Risi: don't use carbon fiber.

Adam Cox: Don't use carbon fiber and listen to people around you.

Kyle Risi: Exactly.

In the weeks that followed the implosion, they do manage to sell a lot of the debris, which included cables, shredder panels, but also what they believe to be human remains.

Oh no.

The debris was taken to Newfoundland for further analysis, and a few weeks later in July, 2023, ocean Gate announces that they were suspending all operations altogether and they basically, they scrubbed their entire website of all of its content.

A new CEOA guy called Gordon Gardner was appointed to deal specifically with the legal minefield that was literally coming straight for them.

Adam Cox: What a job that you are signing up for to go on board just to kind of probably close down the company.

And just deal with that.

Kyle Risi: The Marine Board of Investigation began [01:22:00] planning formal hearings to gather a bunch of testimony from different witnesses and experts and basically issue recommendations on how to prevent something like this from happening ever again.

This is where we get all that testimony from. David Lockridge. And also a bunch of other experts and people connected to the story. And they all paint the same picture. A culture that ignored warnings, dismiss experts, and gambled with people's lives.

And at the crux of all of this was Stockton Rush who wanted to leave his mark on history. Remember, he grew up in the shadow of a 250 year prominent ancestry. His dad was a decorated marine presidents elect of the Bohemian Club.

So I understand the pressure. I just don't understand the way he went about things.

Adam Cox: Yeah, I guess he just, he wanted to make a name for himself, doesn't he? And he has, he's gone down in history, but not for the right reasons.

Kyle Risi: Actually. Someone wrote that Stockton knew how this would end one way or another, either literally or figuratively in the biggest bang in human history. And that's what happened.

Adam Cox: Yeah.

Kyle Risi: And really, it's [01:23:00] not like there was just one single point of failure, right? There were far too many variables, far too many complications, like the fact that they used three dissimilar materials, carbon fiber, titanium, and acrylic, all glued together, all expanding and contracting at different rates under different pressures.

Eventually, Titan failed in literally every way that a sub can fail. The thing is though, this is far from over because in October, 2024, the US Attorney's Office began interviewing former Ocean Gate employees, and there is a strong likelihood that criminal charges are coming their way.

The family of Paul Henry Nole, they'd already filed a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit. Basically, they're alleging that Ocean Gate had misled them about Titan's condition and that Stockton died knowing exactly what was happening.

In the lawsuit, they reference the telemetry from the Polar Prince, which shows that the Titan dropped sandbags 90 minutes into the dive. So that's 15 minutes before the thing actually imploded. And [01:24:00] they're arguing that this was Titan's attempt at aborting the actual mission.

Yet Stockton continued to dive down.

Adam Cox: Really? Yep. Wow.

Kyle Risi: So the crew likely knew that something was happening when that sandbag dropped

Adam Cox: and they had to what? Cover it up almost,

Kyle Risi: I guess it just kept going, going, it's fine, it's just dropped as a malfunction, whatever. But here's the thing, right? The lawsuits, they don't look very hopeful because Titan was operating in international waters.

Every passenger signed a waiver where the word death appeared eight times across three pages. So the likelihood of them actually getting anything considering they've signed these waivers is very, very low.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I mean, It's just negligence, isn't it? This is just, it's terrible. Regardless of the fact they're rich, what other people think about that and they're taking away news from other stories. Yeah, for sure. And I think

Kyle Risi: that the rich aspect is really unfair. Yeah. They're just people at the end of the day.

Adam Cox: Yeah. At the end of the day, they have family. They went on this, expedition thinking that, you know, as a once in a lifetime [01:25:00] opportunity, they weren't aware of their health and safety.

Yeah. About this. No one wishes like that on anyone, I don't think.

Kyle Risi: Exactly. And Adam, that is the story of the Ocean Gate Titan disaster.

Adam Cox: Wow. I didn't realize just how much foreshadowing or warnings there were. Mm. But, yeah. Crazy. Crazy to story.

Kyle Risi: So have I firmly cemented this idea that you'll never get into a deep sea ocean sub again?

Adam Cox: I don't think I was gonna go into it anyway, to be fair. And this just reaffirms that yes,

Kyle Risi: God scary as well. And also being in that confined space in the dark, knowing how claustrophobic we can be sometimes.

Adam Cox: Yeah. It's bad enough. Flying in economy.

Kyle Risi: Have you heard they're gonna start offering standing seats now?

Adam Cox: Oh, they've been talking about that for a while, but no, they're

Kyle Risi: gonna do it now.

Adam Cox: Yeah. I know it was coming, but I think it's, they say for like flights under two hours.

Kyle Risi: Yeah. Short haul flights,

Adam Cox: which okay.

For like an hour maybe. That's fine. But yeah.

Kyle Risi: Oosh, at least they got to sit down and lay down. But God, I just feel awful for these poor people. And all this negligence and the [01:26:00] blatant hubris of Stockton rush. Knowing, and just being so arrogant and still proceeding forward.

Adam Cox: Yeah. All avoidable.

And what was he doing it for? To make himself famous? Well, yeah, he, he's done that, but Yeah. At what cost?

Kyle Risi: Mm-hmm. So should we run the outro for this week? Sure.

And so that brings us to the end of another fascinating foray into the compendium and assembly of fascinating things. We hope you enjoy the ride as much as we did.

Adam Cox: If today's episode sparked your curiosity, then do us a favor and follow us on your favorite podcast app. It truly makes a world of difference and helps more people like you discover the show

Kyle Risi: and for our dedicated freaks out there. Don't forget that next week's episode is already waiting for you on our Patreon, and it is completely free to access.

Adam Cox: And if you want, even more than join our certified freaks tier to unlock the entire archive, delve into exclusive content and get a sneak peek at what's coming next. We'd love for you to be part of our growing community.

Kyle Risi: We drop new episodes every Tuesday, and until then, remember, you can dive as deep as you want, but ignore the [01:27:00] pressure and you'll only surface in stories like this one. We'll see you next time.

Adam Cox: See

Kyle Risi: you.